Summer of Blood: As we forgive our deaders
Whatever else is true of it, Hellraiser: Deader has an extremely dumb title. Formally speaking, "deader" is correct English, but it's not a word that I think anybody uses except in those moments when it is useful to compare things to doornails. And in the context of a horror movie sequel, it's not just awkward, but awkward in an aggressively cumbersome way - "you thought they were dead before? Well now they're deader".
And as it turns out, it's even worse still, because Hellraiser: Deader isn't even using the word "deader" to mean "more dead", at least not primarily. The main thrust of the plot, as we get into it, concerns an expatriate American journalist living in Britain as she travels to Romania to investigate the strange case of a videotape that very clearly shows a woman being shot in the head in a ritual killing, only for her body to come back to life a few minutes later after a man breaths into her dead mouth. This is the strange practice of a cult calling themselves "Deaders", and Amy Klein (Kari Wuhrer) is on assignment from her boss Charles Richmond (Simon Kunz) to learn more about them. So "deader" is a noun, not an adjective, but it's at least arguably a noun derived from an adjective. "We already died once, so when we die again, that makes us deader." I don't fucking know.
Typically when I start out a review getting fiercely bothered by an irrelevant point of word usage, it's because I'm dreading actually getting started in looking at the film itself, and enjoy staving that off by getting nitpicky. That is not entirely the case here. The title really is one of the absolute worst things about Hellraiser: Deader, and worth getting pissed off about, even though the rest of Hellraiser: Deader is still, in fact, quite awful. This third film in the direct-to-video era of the Hellraiser franchise is the first one that unambiguously, indisputably was adapted from a spec script that had fuck-all to do with the Hellraiser franchise until Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and the Lament Configuration were shoved into it. And I find this mildly hard to believe, not because Pinhead has any business being in this story whatsoever, nor because Deader does anything in particular to tie itself to the themes and ideas and amoral cosmology that have driven previous Hellraiser films, but because there's hardly any goddamn content here even with the Hellraiser connection; I am at least a little bit confused whether there could possibly have been enough of a narrative structure for the results to be anything that we might be able to properly recognise as "a movie".
In this case, that spec script was written by one Neil Marshall Stevens, and converted into a sequel by Tim Day, one-half of the writing team of Hellraiser: Hellseeker, the previous release in the series; the other half of that writing team, Carl V. Dupré, was meanwhile busy converting a different spec script into Hellraiser: Hellworld, and the reason for doing that was so that director Rick Bota (also of Hellseeker) would be able to quickly knock out two movies simultaneously when Dimension sent him to Romania in the autumn of 2002. Having gotten both movies in the can by Christmas, the studio then let them just sit there, I guess, waiting all the way until June 2005 to finally plop Deader out into the world. And you know what, when we have "crudely revised spec script", "ruthlessly efficient-out back-to-back Romanian productions" and "sat on the shelf for over two years" all added in with "direct-to-video" and "seventh film in a franchise that hadn't made a good film since the second one", the fact that I have Deader rated all the way as high as an entire star and a half probably means it's a huge overperformer.
For, in fairness, Deader isn't completely barren of anything interesting. Wuhrer's performance is solid enough, certainly more than the material requires of her, or rewards. It's a doomed effort: Amy is an exceedingly generic character, basically just a 21st Century update of the old-school "hardass lady reporter" model - probably the most distinctive bit of characterisation she gets in the film's first hour is when Charles cracks a joke about her cigarette smoking. Nearer to the end, we do actually learn a bit about her, strictly in the interest of giving the film something to hang its climactic twists on. For the most part, she's just a vessel, the person who does the observing as Bota and Day glumly shuttle us from one set to another. On these sets, she encounters various mysterious events in which she learns, honestly, very little about the Deader cult. The script doesn't do a whole lot to distinguish between these; the only time in the whole first hour that any of the spaces Amy pokes her nose into presents anything like atmosphere, or creativity, or visual interest, is when she gets into a subway car and finds she's on the Train of Undead Hedonists: all around her people are doing drugs and screwing under noxious party lighting, while the king hedonist Joey (Marc Warren) snarls out a puke of exposition. I am not, to be clear, claiming this scene is good; in fact, it was exactly this scene where the movie finally forced me to give up hope. The journalism/mystery elements in the story before then certainly aren't interesting, but the elliptical feeling they build up has at least offers up the illusion of genre storytelling: I mean, it's a "mystery", so if we can't figure out how all of these things fit together, maybe that's the point, and if one just rides it out there will eventually be a point where this all snaps into focus. That's basically how both Hellraiser: Inferno and Hellraiser: Hellseeker function, so it seemed at least plausible that Hellraiser: Deader might do exactly the same thing. No such luck: it's not so much that the climax causes things to snap into focus as that it overwrites the rest with something a bit more comprehensible (the climax is the most "actually Hellraiser" part of the whole movie, and therefore the most artlessly tacked-on).
But anyway, what I was getting to is that the Fuck Train scene is the point where two things become clear: Deader has no aspirations higher than to just throw out garish, weird stuff to add some meager flavoring to its watery broth of a plot, and it is never going to give us anything more garish or weirder than this exact scene. It is painfully obvious whilst watching it that this is the best the film can do; it comes at a point in the script where it feels like an explosion has come due, something designed to really dramatically mark Amy's descent into the Bucharest underground. It's got to be a "big" moment, and it is, relatively speaking; but it's such a beastly small "big" moment. And so, faced with this somewhat banal vision of the extreme sensuality that was once upon a time the main interest of the Hellraiser series, we must reckon with the horrible feeling that this is the ceiling. It will never get better than this.
And sure enough, it doesn't, though the mere fact that Doug Bradley appears onscreen even for just a couple of minutes counts as a huge relief so deep into the film's blessedly short 88 minutes. He's yet a third - or are we up to a fourth? - conception of Pinhead; no longer an amoral tour guide of extreme sensation, a bloodthirsty demon, or a hellish moral arbiter, he's now a very grumpy and shouty gatekeeper of souls who is pissed off that the Deaders are trying to gain mastery of Hell by cheating death. This is almost certainly the least-interesting and least-fruitful cosmology in the series yet, but even in this reduced state, Bradley being menacing and angry is something. And it comes at just the right time in the film, right when Wurher finally gets some actual scenes to play, and she's investing those scenes with some bite and an angry stubbornness in the face of two different horrible fates, and no good solutions. It's very little, but it's something, and it allows Deader to at least pretend that there was some reason behind any of what we've just watched. Not nearly enough reason to keep this from being the worst Hellraiser movie made up to that point, but it does raise the gloomy possibility that there's still farther to fall. And it's not like we're done with "shot back-to-back in Romania and shelved for over two years" quite yet...
Body Count: I... dunno. For a while, because of all the resurrections, it feels like 0, and then there's a bit where we see a ton of dead bodies that I couldn't possibly count, and then there's a massacre. Let's go with 11, I think I could defend that number.
Reviews in this series
Hellraiser (Barker, 1987)
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Randel, 1988)
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Hickox, 1992)
Hellraiser: Bloodline (Smithee [Yagher], 1996)
Hellraiser: Inferno (Derrickson, 2000)
Hellraiser: Hellseeker (Bota, 2002)
Hellraiser: Deader (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Hellworld (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Revelations (García, 2011)
Hellraiser: Judgment (Tunnicliffe, 2018)
Hellraiser (Bruckner, 2022)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
And as it turns out, it's even worse still, because Hellraiser: Deader isn't even using the word "deader" to mean "more dead", at least not primarily. The main thrust of the plot, as we get into it, concerns an expatriate American journalist living in Britain as she travels to Romania to investigate the strange case of a videotape that very clearly shows a woman being shot in the head in a ritual killing, only for her body to come back to life a few minutes later after a man breaths into her dead mouth. This is the strange practice of a cult calling themselves "Deaders", and Amy Klein (Kari Wuhrer) is on assignment from her boss Charles Richmond (Simon Kunz) to learn more about them. So "deader" is a noun, not an adjective, but it's at least arguably a noun derived from an adjective. "We already died once, so when we die again, that makes us deader." I don't fucking know.
Typically when I start out a review getting fiercely bothered by an irrelevant point of word usage, it's because I'm dreading actually getting started in looking at the film itself, and enjoy staving that off by getting nitpicky. That is not entirely the case here. The title really is one of the absolute worst things about Hellraiser: Deader, and worth getting pissed off about, even though the rest of Hellraiser: Deader is still, in fact, quite awful. This third film in the direct-to-video era of the Hellraiser franchise is the first one that unambiguously, indisputably was adapted from a spec script that had fuck-all to do with the Hellraiser franchise until Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and the Lament Configuration were shoved into it. And I find this mildly hard to believe, not because Pinhead has any business being in this story whatsoever, nor because Deader does anything in particular to tie itself to the themes and ideas and amoral cosmology that have driven previous Hellraiser films, but because there's hardly any goddamn content here even with the Hellraiser connection; I am at least a little bit confused whether there could possibly have been enough of a narrative structure for the results to be anything that we might be able to properly recognise as "a movie".
In this case, that spec script was written by one Neil Marshall Stevens, and converted into a sequel by Tim Day, one-half of the writing team of Hellraiser: Hellseeker, the previous release in the series; the other half of that writing team, Carl V. Dupré, was meanwhile busy converting a different spec script into Hellraiser: Hellworld, and the reason for doing that was so that director Rick Bota (also of Hellseeker) would be able to quickly knock out two movies simultaneously when Dimension sent him to Romania in the autumn of 2002. Having gotten both movies in the can by Christmas, the studio then let them just sit there, I guess, waiting all the way until June 2005 to finally plop Deader out into the world. And you know what, when we have "crudely revised spec script", "ruthlessly efficient-out back-to-back Romanian productions" and "sat on the shelf for over two years" all added in with "direct-to-video" and "seventh film in a franchise that hadn't made a good film since the second one", the fact that I have Deader rated all the way as high as an entire star and a half probably means it's a huge overperformer.
For, in fairness, Deader isn't completely barren of anything interesting. Wuhrer's performance is solid enough, certainly more than the material requires of her, or rewards. It's a doomed effort: Amy is an exceedingly generic character, basically just a 21st Century update of the old-school "hardass lady reporter" model - probably the most distinctive bit of characterisation she gets in the film's first hour is when Charles cracks a joke about her cigarette smoking. Nearer to the end, we do actually learn a bit about her, strictly in the interest of giving the film something to hang its climactic twists on. For the most part, she's just a vessel, the person who does the observing as Bota and Day glumly shuttle us from one set to another. On these sets, she encounters various mysterious events in which she learns, honestly, very little about the Deader cult. The script doesn't do a whole lot to distinguish between these; the only time in the whole first hour that any of the spaces Amy pokes her nose into presents anything like atmosphere, or creativity, or visual interest, is when she gets into a subway car and finds she's on the Train of Undead Hedonists: all around her people are doing drugs and screwing under noxious party lighting, while the king hedonist Joey (Marc Warren) snarls out a puke of exposition. I am not, to be clear, claiming this scene is good; in fact, it was exactly this scene where the movie finally forced me to give up hope. The journalism/mystery elements in the story before then certainly aren't interesting, but the elliptical feeling they build up has at least offers up the illusion of genre storytelling: I mean, it's a "mystery", so if we can't figure out how all of these things fit together, maybe that's the point, and if one just rides it out there will eventually be a point where this all snaps into focus. That's basically how both Hellraiser: Inferno and Hellraiser: Hellseeker function, so it seemed at least plausible that Hellraiser: Deader might do exactly the same thing. No such luck: it's not so much that the climax causes things to snap into focus as that it overwrites the rest with something a bit more comprehensible (the climax is the most "actually Hellraiser" part of the whole movie, and therefore the most artlessly tacked-on).
But anyway, what I was getting to is that the Fuck Train scene is the point where two things become clear: Deader has no aspirations higher than to just throw out garish, weird stuff to add some meager flavoring to its watery broth of a plot, and it is never going to give us anything more garish or weirder than this exact scene. It is painfully obvious whilst watching it that this is the best the film can do; it comes at a point in the script where it feels like an explosion has come due, something designed to really dramatically mark Amy's descent into the Bucharest underground. It's got to be a "big" moment, and it is, relatively speaking; but it's such a beastly small "big" moment. And so, faced with this somewhat banal vision of the extreme sensuality that was once upon a time the main interest of the Hellraiser series, we must reckon with the horrible feeling that this is the ceiling. It will never get better than this.
And sure enough, it doesn't, though the mere fact that Doug Bradley appears onscreen even for just a couple of minutes counts as a huge relief so deep into the film's blessedly short 88 minutes. He's yet a third - or are we up to a fourth? - conception of Pinhead; no longer an amoral tour guide of extreme sensation, a bloodthirsty demon, or a hellish moral arbiter, he's now a very grumpy and shouty gatekeeper of souls who is pissed off that the Deaders are trying to gain mastery of Hell by cheating death. This is almost certainly the least-interesting and least-fruitful cosmology in the series yet, but even in this reduced state, Bradley being menacing and angry is something. And it comes at just the right time in the film, right when Wurher finally gets some actual scenes to play, and she's investing those scenes with some bite and an angry stubbornness in the face of two different horrible fates, and no good solutions. It's very little, but it's something, and it allows Deader to at least pretend that there was some reason behind any of what we've just watched. Not nearly enough reason to keep this from being the worst Hellraiser movie made up to that point, but it does raise the gloomy possibility that there's still farther to fall. And it's not like we're done with "shot back-to-back in Romania and shelved for over two years" quite yet...
Body Count: I... dunno. For a while, because of all the resurrections, it feels like 0, and then there's a bit where we see a ton of dead bodies that I couldn't possibly count, and then there's a massacre. Let's go with 11, I think I could defend that number.
Reviews in this series
Hellraiser (Barker, 1987)
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Randel, 1988)
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Hickox, 1992)
Hellraiser: Bloodline (Smithee [Yagher], 1996)
Hellraiser: Inferno (Derrickson, 2000)
Hellraiser: Hellseeker (Bota, 2002)
Hellraiser: Deader (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Hellworld (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Revelations (García, 2011)
Hellraiser: Judgment (Tunnicliffe, 2018)
Hellraiser (Bruckner, 2022)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Categories: crimes against art, horror, mysteries, needless sequels, summer of blood
